2:32ASo, so there really are a lot of reasons why we were very grateful when Rodney chose history rather than something more physical.
2:36BThank you.
2:40AExactly.
2:41BHe was born in Guyana, not that long ago. Then he graduated from the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in 1963 with first-class honors in history. And then he proceeded to the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, where he did his PhD on the slave trade. And this is the thesis that led to this book, History of the The thesis was written in 1966. From there he proceeded to Tanzania to teach at Dar es Salaam and then returned to Jamaica to teach at the University of the West Indies and spent about 9 months before he was, as they say, refused entry after leaving the country for a short stay in Canada.
3:38AAnd this, to my mind, led to events which historians will regard as a watershed in recent Caribbean political history.
3:47BThere were popular demonstrations in support of the work that Walter was doing in Jamaica before he was denied entry, and many of the movements that we saw in the late ’60s and early ’70s are, to my mind, closely tied to what he said in 1968 in Jamaica. After being expelled from Jamaica, he returned to Tanzania, and that’s where, uh, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was written. He stayed there until 1974 and then returned to Guyana, which is where he’s still based. Wherever Walter Rodney has lived, he has taken a deep interest in the affairs of the country.
4:41AHe has tried to analyze them.
4:43BHe has written, he’s given in-person presentations about, about these aspects, and he has actually participated in the political process in these countries. This is evident in this short book, Groundings. It’s also evident in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. There are also a number of papers that he has written on Tanzania. Currently, he’s working on a history of the Guyanese working class and is actually participating in the struggles of that class. And it’s therefore to be expected that the interventions own stuff would be subjected to the same incisive scrutiny that is evident in his writings. This is the topic of his presentation this afternoon, and I now turn the floor over to Dr. Walter Rodney.
5:34AGood evening, everyone. It’s always good to be introduced by one’s countryman and by one’s friend. I recall that on one occasion the Prime Minister of Guyana was to have addressed the conference, and he was introduced by someone who chose to quote somewhat hackneyed phrase from Shakespeare about individuals who have -- some of whom seek greatness and others achieve it, and some have it thrust upon them. You will recall the quotation. And he said that the Prime Prime Minister of Guyana qualified in all 3 ways. Now that in itself is strange. What is stranger still is that the individual who was making the introduction was the Ombudsman in Guyana.
6:39AThat is to say, the public official, the unbiased public official to whom you, you would take a dispute which you had with the Prime Minister. So I hope that, um, fortunately you and I have no disputes which have to be I would say that taking my cue from his very last remarks, I would remind you that I am in fact resident in Guyana, that I am attempting to lay work, reflect within that society, and that what I have to say therefore is specifically from that perspective. Indeed, the topic is entitled Jonestown: A Caribbean or a Guyanese Perspective. I say this at the beginning so that we start together, so that we have no false expectations the one of the other.
7:35AI will offer, for instance, no explanations of the mystery of motives behind the mass murder and suicide in Jonestown. I will not attempt to cover any possible involvement of the CIA. I will not delve into the amazing sex life of Mr. Jimmy Jones. I have no interest in recounting the final moments at Jonestown. Those are issues which have been touched by others, sometimes satisfactorily, sometimes not so satisfactorily, but in any event they fall outside of my own purview. Instead, I want to speak about Guyanese society, and in speaking about Guyanese society, secondly, it will be possible to generalize about the type of society the dependent colonial society of which Guyana is but one example.
8:34AAnd thirdly, I would like us to reflect upon the relationships between this society and the dependent society, the relationship between metropolitan societies and ones like Guyana, the Caribbean, Africa, and the so-called Third World, which are peripheral within the international capitalist system, because there are relations which are integral, which are essential, which are recurring between this part of the world and my part of the world. And it is incumbent upon us not merely to understand our societies in and of themselves, but to understand them within the wider framework. Having said that, the question which has been posed by Guyanese and in Guyana with respect to Jonestown is essentially, why should it have happened in Guyana?
9:34AOthers will ask, why did Jonestown occur? We would ask, why did it occur in Guyana? Was it a mere quirk? Was it an accident in the absolute sense of that word, that it defeats any logical understanding that it should have occurred in Guyana? And we would argue that it was no accident that it was not incidental, that it is central to an understanding of that tragedy, that Guyana provided the framework in which it occurred, and that it tells us a great deal about Guyanese society and about dependent peripheral neo-colonial post-colonial societies of the type. First of all, what is very general to many I would say indeed to all of the post-colonial societies, a feature which they have not shared since colonial days is a certain type of welcome, a certain uncritical welcome to that which proceeds from the metropoles.
10:44AIt is a welcoming spirit which in some senses is worthwhile, is credible and creditable, but it also opens these societies to being conned. It opens these societies to all manner of misdeeds. For example, quite removed from Jonestown, the sort of thing that occurs when a European or American businessman steps off a plane, whether it be in Kingston or in Accra, and he carries with him the aura of the metropolitan society, and that aura allows him to sell all manner of junk at inflated rates in our society because there is that presumption of, of benefits stemming from the metropoles. There is that over -- the overtones that go with cultural imperialism which allow that particular individual to function so effectively in our society to the detriment of our own people.
11:44AThere was some of that in Jonestown and in the welcoming carpet which was laid out for the Reverend Jim Jones when he approached our society and our government with respect to the settlement at Jonestown. More important still, however, would be the character of our state, of the specific post-colonial state which is developed in Guyana with its own peculiarities, but which at the same time is part and parcel of a series of Third World states which show a great deal in common, which demonstrate many features in common. A state which has distanced itself from the mass of the producers and the mass of the citizens in that state.
12:33ASpoken of in class terms, it is a state which is not only alienated from the working people and the peasantry of our region, of our country, but which has also increasingly alienated itself even from the middle strata, even from the so-called petty bourgeoisie, who in objective terms may be said to constitute the class from which the government was recruited. Even that class finds that the actual mechanisms of the state, both coercive and non-coercive, are not in the hands of the middle class, and of course even less so in the hands of the working classes. They become mechanisms which are monopolized by a very tiny segment of the population, usually itself dominated by petty bourgeois concerns, usually engaged either explicitly or otherwise in an alliance with international capital, but concerned internally with the disciplining and control of the mass of working people in the society.
13:49AThat is their principal function. Whether they carry this out through the conventional state apparatuses of the police and the judiciary, or through the ever-extending tentacles of the state into the media and into the spheres of education. The fact is that they have created at this particular historical juncture something approaching an uncontrollable monster. One doesn’t have the time to go into the whole theorizing about the state. One understands that the state is not separate from the society, but at our particular historical juncture, the youth of these new societies, those who control the state, are in fact in a position to exercise inordinate power, to twist the society and to twist -- to manipulate the surplus, to manipulate persons, ideas, people, and so on in their own narrowly defined interests.
14:48AI would like to suggest that this is very important for understanding Jonestown, and that Jonestown in turn helps us the better to understand the distance which grows up between the colonial or post-colonial state and the mass of its subjects, the alienation between citizen and state, and particularly between the working-class citizens and the state. Because Jonestown was essentially based upon a relationship between the People’s Temple, or the hierarchy of the People’s Temple, and a number of individuals within the government of Guyana. It was not even an official relationship between the People’s Temple and the government in the open legal sense that our Parliament and our national institutions had validated and legalized the relationship between the People’s Temple and the Guyanese people.
15:53AIt was a very narrow, specific relationship between members of the government, prominent members of the government. Who were The they? Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister of Foreign Affairs, heads of the judiciary and the police, ambassador in this country -- specific individuals controlling positions of public power in the context of the warped nature of our state, in the context of the lack of control over that state on the part of the Guyanese people. These individuals established what proved ultimately to be a very current relationship with a group which was recruited from outside of our society. What is interesting is, of course, that the mass of the people in Guyana were deliberately excluded from knowledge of Jonestown.
16:51ASome 2 years ago, one political group, which at that time in fact was one of the groups which worked in a coalition, which -- of which I myself was a part, a group known as the Working People’s Vanguard Party, raised particular questions, repeated rumors that had been heard, queried what was Jonestown, what was the extent of its holdings, what was its status, what was the relationship between the Guyana government and the U.S. citizens who were residents of Jonestown. In other words, they asked the kinds of questions which were in fact publicly and internationally raised after the Holocaust of November of 1978. But at that time we received no answers because it is the normal procedure in Guyana that the government offers no answers, offers no explanations to its citizens.
17:50AIt is a government that is so distant from the population that the normal functioning of information flows in the society, that does not occur. What you take to be commonplace, that citizens have access to what is called public information information which is both generated publicly and which is known to be in the public interest, such information becomes practically state secrets in Guyana and in a large number of Third World countries. That is why I feel that the import of my remarks will extend beyond the boundaries of Guyana. States in which it is no longer possible to have national income figures, national account figures, no longer possible to get data on the state of employment or unemployment, in the society.
18:42AOne is given a series of fictitious data concerning the inflation rates and so on. The question of audited public accounts, which even in the colonial days used to be treated as a standard procedure, that every year every ministry, every institution of the government which handled public funds should give an account to the people, uh, from whom these funds derive and whose behalf these funds were supposed to be exercised. Practices such as those have disappeared in independent Guyana. We still have an official who is called the Director of Public Audit, but never has there been a post which is a greater sinecure than the Director of Public Audit in Guyana.
19:27AHe has not produced an audit for some 8 or 10 years, and I imagine that the only way his job would be in danger is if he in fact dared to try and produce an audit of public accounts. So it is against that background that one must understand, curiously enough, that this large settlement of non-Guyanese could flourish inside of our national boundaries, and the government did not find it before the crisis, during the crisis, or subsequent to the crisis to offer to the Guyanese people any explanation whatsoever as to the terms under which that group resided in our society. Whatever we know of Jonestown, we know, we know through the investigations that have gone through channels outside of the government.
20:21AAnd many of our people in fact know paradoxically that which they learned from the foreign press and the foreign media, because it was one of those paradoxes that after the news broke in Guyana, when the government for something like 48 hours suppressed the news in Guyana, it began to leak through the international media, and Guyanese were actually calling abroad to London and New York and Toronto and wherever they had their friends and relatives, saying, will you please tell us what is this that is happening inside of Guyana?
20:54BWe don’t know.
20:56AAnd ultimately, the government bended when it saw that the news was too big to hold and our people were getting the details. It seems to me that that particular parameter is especially important as a parameter that in third world countries it has now become the norm, not the exception, that people have no access to important public information on which they should base judgments about events in their society. So Jonestown was, in this particular respect at any rate, possible because it was entered into in a context in which the Guyanese people have no control, nor do they have even the prerequisites of that control, which is information.
21:44AWe’re assuming that whatever judgment one arrives at, the prerequisite for that judgment is a minimum of information on which one would exercise the judgment. And our people were deprived of that before and during and since the crisis. And the news blackout and the government attempts to ensure that we do not discover the essentials of Jonestown, uh, that The process still continues. There was a major public demonstration just after the incident. This was blacked out of the media. Few people outside of our country, even some people in our country, didn’t know that there was a major public demonstration where people were demanding that the government should investigate Jonestown.
22:28AUltimately, after the U.S. government itself announced that it would investigate, the Guyana government very belatedly said it would appoint a commissioner. It would appoint a commission of investigation. It did in fact appoint one of its judges to be the investigator, one of the types who would normally say that the Prime Minister has greatness thrust upon him from all directions. And this individual has not yet begun to constitute the administrative mechanism for the investigation. This incident, as you know, occurred in November of last year, and at the present moment, the Guyanese government has not yet begun even even to grab the administrative infrastructure to carry out an investigation into the incident.
23:17AAnd this is the type of situation which I am suggesting made a Jonestown possible. That is the first stage of my analysis. The kind of situation in Guyana predisposed -- it made a Jonestown possible. It didn’t necessarily make it inevitable. We shall proceed in a little while to see how it became more and more likely as time went on. It became more likely because the state in Guyana, like so many other parts of the Third World, is not only alienated from the population, but implicit in that alienation is the fact that it has become a mechanism for accumulation on the part of segments of the national petty bourgeoisie or bourgeoisie.
24:07AThere are individuals within the society who see the state as the principal means by which they would acquire wealth personally. That if we looked at the variety of ways in which individuals can acquire wealth traditionally -- ownership of land, ownership of various forms of private property which yields value of a particular type -- this still obtains in our society. But throughout the Third World, the state has been asked to do more than simply referee the struggle between the owners of the means of production and the working class or the struggle between different types of capitalists. The state has become that agency which is being consciously utilized and consciously fought over by a number of contending agencies precisely because they are aware that it can be used as an instrument of accumulation.
25:04AAnd all the more is this true when the state extends its function beyond the so-called conventional or traditional functions which -- with which it has been associated, and begins to undertake direct political enterprises, which is of course the case in Guyana as in so many other parts of the Third World. As an integral part of the means of accumulation in the Third World, we must consider the element of corruption. Corruption, to my mind, is not an aberration in the Third World. It’s part of the normative political behavior now established in the Third World. This has to be understood because every Third World country to which you go, whether it be Nigeria or Ghana, Tanzania, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, you will see in the national press some discussion of corruption and people proposing ways in which they could remove this blemish of corruption.
26:08AThe premise being that corruption is alien to the system and it requires a few techniques and a few more honest persons here and there and you will get rid of corruption. For example, in Guyana when we had a lot of problems, the government decided they would appoint an ombudsman who would look into instances of corruption, and then the problem became who would supervise the ombudsman? Because the corruption being so endemic must really be seen as part of the means by which those who control the state in the Third World do not in fact bother to draw a distinction between the quote-unquote legitimate and illegitimate means of accumulation.
26:53AAny means that flow logically from the monopoly of political power are considered as acceptable within the political framework, and things such as cutbacks, fraud, the removal of public funds, these are integral at the present time to the distorted Third World states. And of course, they have a tremendous significance because in a number of economies, Guyana being included, the size of the economy is so small that when a significant amount of funds happens to be removed from the public treasury, it makes a great deal of difference to national economic development. At the present moment, Guyana is in the grip of the International Monetary Fund. We ask the International Monetary Fund for a standby credit of $20 million, for example, and the society has to go through all manner of tricks, standing on its head and exploiting and oppressing the working people in order to meet the demands of the IMF.
28:02AAnd yet the amount for which we are asking the IMF is actually less than amounts known to have been siphoned off lost in foreign exchange frauds in Guyana over the last 5 or 10 years -- over the last 5 years, really. There have been a series of foreign exchange frauds which have removed from the public treasury more than $20 million, and yet we now have to turn and ask an international agency to, uh, to replace this with all the conditions which you know about and to which I will in fact allude in a short while. What I’m driving at there is that this, as it were, invitation to corruption that is part of these Third World systems, one automatically asks, now what was Jonestown in the context of the material corruption of which the government, or for which the government of Guyana is well known?
28:58AAnd one sees that it was located in an area which gave access to the gold and diamond fields One notes that there was a significant amount of gold, in fact, discovered in the settlement at the time. One notes that foreign currency, that is US dollars, were present in that area in huge quantities. And in our society, we are therefore speaking about gold, diamonds, and hard currency -- 3 commodities. We regard the currency in that sense as a commodity because foreign currency is a scarce and valuable commodity in our context. And it is very clear even without our knowing the details of the transaction, that there was a relationship between members of the government in their specific individual as well as public capacities and the leadership of Stone Star, which was based upon the movement of these commodities.
29:55ABecause every effort was made to ensure that the movement of these commodities would not be monitored. It did not go through the normal customs regulations. In fact, it broke the laws, all the laws of Guyana which have to do with the control of currency and of gold and diamonds, because you have to have a license to trade in gold and diamonds, for which the People’s Temple had not applied. And one has to have, in Guyana, to have a permit to even $10 American in your possession. And an attempt to change currency one way or another constitutes a serious offense, for which dozens, indeed hundreds of Guyanese have been brought before the courts on foreign currency charges.
30:38ASo when one sees this settlement left free to speculate in these 3 commodities, visited frequently by the upper echelons of the government, it doesn’t require a great deal of perspicacity to recognize what was the nature of the material connection. There was an incident reported shortly after the actual death had occurred, uh, in which it was reported that the Deputy Prime Minister and the wife of the Prime Minister had brought gold and currency from Jonestown to Georgetown in a plane. The government of Guyana was very upset and issued an official disclaimer of this story. They said it was not true that they had brought the gold and diamonds on a plane.
31:30AIt was merely that they traveled on the same plane which brought the gold and diamonds to Georgetown. The fact that no one else was on the plane Uh, not really very important in their calculation. So the context of what I will in this sense call material corruption is important for laying the basis for why a Jonestown becomes more and more possible. In other words, it is introduced without the knowledge of the Guyanese people, it proceeds without any supervision from the Guyanese people, and it proceeds in a direction in which so long as specific members of the government will get their cut from the transactions taking place, in a sense anything goes, or anything could have gone on in that settlement without incurring the ire or the concern of the government of Guyana, because their concern was with one thing.
32:34AAnd this is precisely how the scenario was elaborated. If we examine examined the -- if we examine data that is fully accessible, quite apart from other things that we suspect to be true and other rumors that are current in Guyana, we know that Georgetown entered into part of the deeper corruption of Guyanese political and social life. By the deeper corruption, I mean the things that go beyond merely a transfer of money or of something valuable, the corruption that makes it impossible for the state to function even within the narrow framework of the Constitution which we presently have. And I take 2 examples having to do with the police and the judiciary.
33:18AFirst, the police. It does appear that the security services expressed a certain amount of alarm over what was taking place in Jonestown. The police, to the best -- first of all, the army, to the best of our knowledge, were told that they should -- it should be hands-off, that Jonestown was not an area into which they would normally go to conduct exercises, etc. And any matter dealing with Jonestown must be cleared in an entirely different fashion. The police were concerned, apparently, because they heard reports. And it seems from a variety of statements which have not been denied, even by the government itself, even by the Commissioner of Police himself, that at some stage he dared to express his concern and to move to have certain things done.
34:10AAnd the word came back to him, uh, that that was not his prerogative, that was not his function. Hands off. So the word came from above, not from below. People below are not in the habit of giving orders to the chief police officer of a country. So the Commissioner of Police got this order from some source which is still unidentified, but we know that we have narrowed the focus considerably when we understand this. Chief police officers only take orders from a certain height, and we know that within our government that limit is to a very few individuals. He was told, hands off. He had an interview with a number of Guyanese citizens after the Jonestown massacre, as it is called, and in this interview he was asked, why was that guns were present in such large numbers in Jonestown, why it was that dangerous drugs were present, because they do fall under our legislation, why it was that currency was there, why did they have machinery for which they had no license, why was it that their boats came and went without going through Guyanese customs, etc.
35:29AWhat was the role of the police in all this? And he gave a very curious reply. He said that people get the police protection which they deserve. One has to place this in a broader context of the way in which the police harassed the citizens of Guyana, and one infers from that that he was saying that whatever protection -- that in effect Jonestown did not need protection. It was being protected by the political elite, that the political elite had deemed it fit that they should proceed in the way in which they were proceeding, and he did not feel, as the chief police official, that the people of Jonestown needed any protection.
36:15AA very remarkable statement. And one bears in mind that under international law, as well as under the conventions which guide people in any society, it is normally accepted that when one moves into a new country, into a different country, one automatically receives the protection that that state has to offer, the protection which that country has to offer. But our chief police official determined that the people of Jonestown did not need or deserve any protection. And this, of course, is because of that wider corruption in which it is possible for a phone call to be made to a high public official and for him automatically, immediately to desist from carrying out his legitimate function.
37:02AWith the judiciary, it was just as bad. It was clear that in the case of the Stoen child, that now famous or infamous case, notorious case, which came over from the courts here to the courts of Guyana that at least one judge in Guyana was prepared to order that the child be taken into the custody of the court. Because if there was a dispute, as there was, over the custody of the child, then the procedure which we have inherited from the English law may or may not be the same here, is that the court shall in the interim exercise custody over the child. child. So one of our judges sought to take the Stoen child from the Reverend Jim Jones and maintain it in the custody of the court.
37:52AThe record shows that he was frustrated in this enterprise by the registrar of the court, an important public official, that he was frustrated by political interference, that he was actually receiving a number of threats And ultimately he decided that under the circumstances he would wash his hands of the case. He made a public statement that he could not finally give judgment on the issue because a variety of methods were being used by parties on both sides, as he put it, to stop him from exercising his judicial judgment. And the case was given return, as is our practice, to the Chief Justice, who is who has the authority to reallocate that case to another judge.
38:45AAnd under normal circumstances, that authority would have been exercised to ensure that justice was being done. He would not have -- it would not have been possible to tolerate undue delay. It would have been reallocated to another judge. But it so happened that the matter was simply placed in abeyance. Our Chief Justice determined in his wisdom that it was not necessary to reallocate escaped. And so the Stoen child, like so many other children, uh, was murdered at Jonestown. So that’s really -- when one looks at the scenario from our perspective, we as the Guyanese people recognize the ways in which, as the days went by, Jonestown, without our knowledge -- because most of this comes from hindsight, very few people had access to this information But as we saw it in hindsight, Jonestown, while it may not have been predictable, was certainly preventable.
39:48AWe mustn’t get involved in a mysticism which says, oh, this thing is impossible to comprehend. How can human beings do this to themselves and each other? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but those individuals were living in a specific society, and if that society was articulated in a particular way, their, their lives could not have been placed in danger in that -- as eventually occurred. It would have been prevented because so many abuses were known to have been occurring over the weeks and the months prior to the final debacle that something would have been done to put a stop to it. In that sense, it would have been prevented.
40:32AIt would not have been prevented because someone forced thought that 916 people would have died, but they would have put a stop to it because they would have said this settlement is not in the national interest. They would have said that the rules governing the control, the authoritarian control by leadership in this settlement over the various individuals, is not compatible with the rules governing, uh, the behavior of citizens or non-citizens in the society. They would, if they were serious about certain ideological pronouncements announcements which they were making, they would of course have said that this is not a socialist settlement in the least. But all of these hypothetical preconditions did not exist.
41:18AThe government is not socialist. The government was -- it was not concerned about the lives of its own citizens, and least about the, the common rank and file of the People’s Temple. And so they allowed a certain situation to grow and grow until, uh, the final outburst with which we are all familiar. them was preventable, and if it was to have been prevented, the principal agency in its prevention would have had to be the Guyanese government. The U.S. government bears a certain responsibility, and it’s interesting to see that in the recent report, which was aired only a few days ago, there has been a cautious and guarded recognition of that failure of responsibility on the part of the U.S.
42:06Agovernment. Because a citizen of abroad is in a curious position. In a certain sense, a citizen abroad is even more protected than a citizen at home because he or she falls under the protection of the host government. That’s the first line of defense. And if that host government fails to provide protection, then they can have recourse to their own government via its agencies, embassies, and consulates, and so on. The people of Jonestown found that neither of these two lines of defense were of any to them. The government of Guyana was uninterested in their well-being, and the government of the United States reneged, for whatever reason, reneged on its function of entering to ensure that citizens abroad were being protected.
42:52ASo that this tragedy is not the huge mystery that it has been made out to be. As a social phenomenon, Jonestown was most definitely preventable. And while you may wish to ask the U.S. government some further questions, we are concerned with raising these questions to the Guyanese government. Thank you very much. government. It is still a political issue in our country. Now, it is of course part of the larger tragedy of Guyana. Jonestown merely came at a juncture when the national life was reeling from a series of blows. The economy is at a lower ebb than ever. The national balance is a negative figure. There is inflation beyond, uh, all acceptable proportions.
43:38AUnemployment spiraling Social violence increases. The very moral fiber of the society begins to collapse in a most all-encompassing manner. One of the biggest issues in Guyana today amongst the population is how to get out. It’s a society that is fast losing confidence even in its own ability to continue to persist, and a large proportion of people are seeking to exit, escape from society. It’s not, uh, not Guyana alone, of course. A number of Caribbean societies are going through the same crisis to greater or lesser extent. I remember that some wit, I was told, in Jamaica, some wit chalked up a slogan asking the last person to leave the island to please turn the lights off, you know, switch off the electricity, because it seemed as though that is the direction in which it was going.
44:37AIn Guyana, the government has long since switched off the electricity, so we don’t have that problem. But essentially, it’s part of a larger tragedy with which, of course, we as Guyanese.
